The Most Expensive MythBusters Episodes
"It's like an early Tony Stark trying to get the bugs out of the Ironman suit," says Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the episode of his popular science podcast Star Talk in which he interviews Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters. And the description isn't off the mark. The dynamic duo of nerdy tinkerers strapped quite a few rockets to things that don't normally need rockets during their nearly two decades of hosting the hit Discovery Channel show.
That was precisely the idea behind the number one most expensive MythBusters show in history. Savage and Hyneman told our personal astrophysicist that their priciest myth to test was when they tested a supposed Darwin Awards death of a man who souped up his sedan with a rocket, reached 300 mph, caught some sick air, and then blew himself to bits in a dramatic, fiery mountainside crash.
But the MythBusters crew conducted several spectacular experiments, and speculation as to their most expensive myths to bust has raged online for years. Adam and Jamie's most avid fans still keep the MythBusters subreddit busy with questions, speculation, more myths they want busted or confirmed. In 2015, one curious user who must not have heard the Star Talk interview asked about the most expensive myth ever tested on the show and received some great runners up from other fans.
The time the MythBusters attacked a San Francisco neighborhood, pirate style
One candidate was the time they accidentally shot a stone cannonball straight through a neighbor's home. According to the SF Gate, "the cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the [target], tore through a cinderblock wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east," in an area where schoolchildren were returning home. When it hit a house, it "ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom." The family napping in the room somehow wasn't woken up by the noise of the projectile blasting holes in their walls. They woke up because of the plaster dust its destruction left behind. The ball went on to ricochet off another house and cross a six-lane road before finally being stopped by a minivan parked in a driveway.
To the busters' credit, an officer responding to the 911 call said, "Be advised that the holes through the house are perfectly round and match the description of the cannonball." The inadvertent attack, however, was not used to confirm the myth that you can make a cannonball out of stone. The crew postponed the segment until they could find a safer location to test the hypothesis again.
Another contender was the time the MythBusters tested the toughness of the U-2 jet engine. Funnily enough, with all the rockets, cannons, and other explosives they used on set, what worried Adam and Jamie most was a simple car crash.